June 12, 2000 -
You're out of the office and without your laptop, but you'll still be able to organize a conference call and control a slide presentation on the Web - with a Palm Pilot and a cell phone.

With a click on an icon, one can call people from an address book to be connected to a conference call. Using a cell phone, he or she can join the conversation and, using a Palm Pilot, control a pre-stored graphical presentation seen by each of the callers over the Internet. The user can even utilize the Palm to mute individual participants or the whole group, lock the conference for privacy, send e-mail invitations to other people, or record the call.

The new software, dubbed "Evoke mobile webconferencing," eventually will land on other handheld devices, including smart phones and BlackBerry pagers, which are handheld wireless e-mail devices, said Jim LeJeal, chief operating officer of Evoke.

The 3-year-old Web conferencing company, previously known as Vstream, has grown to 420 employees from 94 in just six months and expects to hire another 38 people to develop more wireless software.

"Every service on the Palm now is a query service," LeJeal said. "It needs to be more than checking a stock or downloading a brochure from the Internet. This is the first to be truly two-way and interactive."

Evoke hopes to make a big splash today by demonstrating the wireless technology at the Streaming Media East conference in New York. The exhibit will be accompanied by full-page advertisements today in The Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News, and a year-long, $15 million print, online and outdoor ad campaign.

At least 70,000 companies are vying to develop new applications for the Palm, which controls more than three-quarters of the market for personal digital assistants.

Palm Inc., the Santa Clara, Calif., maker of the devices, doesn't typically sign development agreements for these applications, since the Palm operating system is similar to that of a Windows operating system - anyone can develop programs for them.

Evoke is still testing its Palm Pilot service with about 33 companies. But by this fall, people should be able to download the software for free from the company's Web site, www.evoke.com. Conference calls will cost 37 cents a minute, plus a $10 charge to record the call. "It's all the rage in our office," said Michael Gellman, one of the customers who tested the software.

As chief executive of Denver Web design firm SpireMedia Inc., Gellman spent the past two weeks in five different cities testing the new Evoke service. Because he keeps all of his addresses in his Palm Pilot, he said it was easy to coordinate conferences among himself, people in his Denver and New York offices and clients across the country.

"I can manage who is involved in the conference from the airport, or a car getting driven back from the airport, and I don't have to find a place to plug my laptop in," Gellman said.

"Lately, I don't even want to use my computer for it. If I have my Palm, it's like a remote control."

More people are expected to take that attitude. In the next three years, the number of wireless mobile devices with Internet access are expected to grow to 536 million from today's 20 million. Personal digital assistants such as the Palm Pilot are expected to account for 12 million of those wireless devices. LeJeal said he hopes Evoke's decision to move into wireless will boost Evoke's revenues and improve its shot at an initial public offering. The company filed documents in February with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not said when it will sell stock to the public. The company lost $17.3 million on sales of $1.8 million during the first quarter of this year.

"There were times I believed that customers didn't use our service because they weren't in the office - they were in a red carpet club in the airport," LeJeal said. "Within a year, you're going to see people in airports dial up Web conferencing through their Palm and their cell phone, and we'll say, 'Hey, that's us.' "

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